This disclosure relates generally to online systems, and more specifically to training one or more machine learned models used by an online system.
Online systems, such as a social networking system, allow a user to connect and communicate with other users. Users may create profiles on an online system that are tied to their identities and include information about the users, such as interests and demographic information. Users may be individuals or entities such as corporations or charities. An online system receives content from various sources, such as users, and selects content items from the received content for presentation to the user. Interactions between the user and the selected content items are maintained by the online system and communicated to other online system users to facilitate interaction between users and the online system.
When selecting content items for presentation to a user, an online system may use one or more machine learned models that select one or more content items based on features of online system users or content items. For example, a machine learned model associates values with different types of user interactions with a content item and determines likelihoods of a user performing different types of interactions based on characteristics of the user, such as prior interactions by the user, and characteristics of the content item. In this example, the machine learned model generates a value associated with the content item, and the online system determines, based on the determined value, whether to present the content item to the user.
An online system may use one or more machine learned models to select different types of content items for presentation to a user. Different machine learned models may be based on different features of the user or of content items. The large number of features used by different machine learned models makes modification of one or more of the machine learned models cumbersome and time-consuming. For example, testing inclusion of an additional feature in a machine learned model is often time consuming for conventional online systems.